Casey Beats John, 29–29
John:
That is the challenge of pixel art, isn't it?
John:
To make a picture look good using pixels.
John:
Or we can just rotate the pixels 45 degrees and pretend we're in some crazy land.
Marco:
Hey everyone, just me for a second.
Marco:
We just put up our 2016 t-shirts, finally.
Marco:
They're only available until June 3rd.
Marco:
Now they won't be delivered in time for WWDC because we took too long to decide, but these are awesome and I think they're going to be worth the wait.
Marco:
So see for yourself at atp.fm slash shirt.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
Hashtag Casey was right, maybe?
Casey:
It's been stunning watching the fallout from Fast Foodgate 2016, which I just coined moments ago.
Casey:
A lot of people have been on my side.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's overwhelming, but the fact that I think the feedback I've seen has been roughly 50-50, I'm counting that as a win for me.
John:
I don't think that's how winning works, exactly.
John:
Roughly 50-50, and I declare victory.
Casey:
No, John, if there's one universal truth to the internet, it's that the internet believes that John Syracuse can do no wrong.
John:
That is not a universal truth.
Casey:
That is fact.
Casey:
You're projecting.
Casey:
Perhaps.
Casey:
That's neither here nor there.
Casey:
The internet is of the belief that John Syracuse can do no wrong, and parts of the internet have said...
Casey:
John Syracuse has done wrong.
Casey:
And actually it's funny because some people, and this is not a joke.
Casey:
Some people have written in and said, and I don't have an exact verbatim quote in front of me, but something along the lines of, I thought John could never be wrong, but he's wrong about this food conversation, which has made me so happy.
Marco:
So to clarify, John being wrong means that people think Subway is better than Sbarro's?
Casey:
Yes, or is not an utter unequivocal abomination.
John:
Well, as in all things, like the actual points that people respond to were only tangentially related to points made by either of us on the actual show.
John:
The most solid ones were, I felt like, were people who were just saying, I like or don't like a particular restaurant's food.
Casey:
That's fair, that's fair.
John:
Right.
John:
And because then you go, all right, like we were talking about restaurants and you could say, I love Subway or I hate Subway.
John:
I love Subarro.
John:
I hate Subarro.
John:
Right.
John:
But the ones who came away with the conclusion that there was the comparisons were made, they were actually not made.
John:
For example, comparing Subway and Subarro and what you would rather eat in a show in which I said, I, you know, or McDonald's even in a show in which I said, I eat Subway way more than McDonald's.
John:
And yet you have people saying that that meant that McDonald's was better than Subway or Subway was better than McDonald's anyway.
John:
lots of people latched on to their own particular competitions but i would say in the realm of subway is good subway is bad sbarro is good sbarro is bad where they didn't try to compare the two of them it was about 50 50 and it's like the uh which i just googled the 1968 yale versus harvard football game which was listed in the uh newspaper i gotta find this
John:
All right, here it is.
John:
The famous headline, which they bury in the last sentence of the paragraph.
John:
The headline after this football game in 1968 was Harvard beats EL 29-29.
John:
Because it was a game that ended in a tie.
John:
So this is Casey beats John 50-50.
Casey:
I'll take it.
Casey:
I'm good with that.
Casey:
You're not going to hear me complain.
John:
Anyway, I would just point out that literally all these issues are a matter of taste in all senses of that word.
John:
So there can be no victory.
John:
Unless one of these food items is going to kill you, which I don't think either one will.
John:
That's true.
John:
These issues are a matter of taste, but my taste is better than your taste.
John:
Well, that's how taste works, doesn't it?
John:
But anyway, it's not as if there is a definitive answer.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Yeah, but I will take the John loses to Casey 50-50 or Casey beats John 50-50.
John:
Or you can do one to one.
John:
50-50, we're just using as percentages, but since this was a football score, it's points, so maybe it's one to one.
Casey:
Yeah, I'll take me beating you with a tie.
Casey:
That is good in my book.
John:
Anyway, just so you know, since you don't read my at mentions, every time I say anything, somebody says, boy, I usually agree with what you say, but you're really wrong about X. That happens all the time.
John:
That's like 50% of my replies are people telling me that they usually agree with me, but they disagree with me about insert whatever.
John:
And whatever you can think of has been there.
John:
yeah but to be fair people start from the position of oh john is right about this whereas without turning this into analog i'm not as convinced that people feel that way about me well then you're spared all the all the tweets about how everyone is so disappointed in you every time yeah yeah usually i agree with everything you say casey but i'm very disappointed in your opinion on the windows xp bumper sounds or cars or the restaurants you want to go to or your choice of uh you know
Casey:
any other thing you possibly anyway uh yeah you're right those those uh replies do show a sort of the baseline assumption but on the other hand if that baseline assumption doesn't exist i don't get those tweets there's that but all i'm gonna say is i will take your struggle which is oh so real over over mine anyway but uh no i'm really happy that we kept and we slash marco kept that conversation in the show because i thought it was really funny and and
Casey:
As much as the bickering back and forth between listeners and between us went on, I still appreciate the fact that everyone seemed to take it for what it was meant to be, which was, yes, we were killing each other, but it was all in good fun.
Casey:
And we got some good feedback about the segment in general, which made me really happy.
Casey:
And like I said, Casey beats John 50-50, so I'm good with that.
Casey:
massive overwhelming agreement that the that it was fun listening to us argue in the after show i think one person didn't like it and poor marco had to say you were literally the only person he was we we got literally one complaint uh yeah it was funny um and that person i believe was like i'm sure i'm not the first person to say this but that was not good and as it turns out individual you were the first person to say that and the only person to say that
Casey:
Anyway, I thought it was a lot of fun.
Casey:
And even though I wanted to kill both of you, particularly John, because I think Marco kind of ended up in Switzerland by the end of the conversation.
John:
I don't know why you focus all your anger on me, because I re-listened to that thing.
John:
And Marco was the one constantly poking and prodding you and egging you on.
John:
I was the one trying to bring it back to like Siri and Vive and stuff.
John:
And then Marco's like throwing these little bombs and walking away.
John:
It was totally Marco's fault.
John:
It was not me.
John:
Go back and listen to it.
Marco:
I also was not really 100% on either of your sides, but I was mostly... You're just an instigator.
Marco:
Yeah, but I was actually leaning mostly towards Casey's side.
Marco:
Not that this stuff was very good, but that I thought that Subway was less terrible than Sbarro.
Marco:
Now I know at least when we're all at WWDC in a few weeks, we have to go to that mall food court.
John:
They don't have any of those brands there.
John:
They all have weird stuff.
John:
Well, here's the one we can put in the after show.
John:
WWDC box lunch versus any fast food.
Casey:
Sometimes those box lunches aren't bad.
Casey:
Sometimes they're not so good.
Casey:
Sometimes.
John:
Sometimes they are.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the problem with the box lunches is that they basically all just taste like whatever the salad dressing was they used to coat every ingredient that day.
John:
Yeah, that's probably fair.
John:
And the ingredients themselves are often made of cardboard.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So you're basically tasting very chewy cardboard that tastes like salad dressing.
John:
That's not a bad summary.
Casey:
Although apparently at Google I.O., which we're going to talk about quite a bit later, they don't serve you lunch, it seems like.
Casey:
Well, they don't even serve you a roof.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Sit outside in the sun.
John:
90 degrees?
John:
Like lizards on hot rocks.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
I can't handle this already.
Casey:
So Aline, a friend of the show, Aline Sims, wrote in and said, In-N-Out does not use frozen burger patties.
Casey:
I don't remember when or how that came up.
John:
I said that.
John:
We regret the error.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
Sorry, In-N-Out.
John:
I've only been to In-N-Out like four times, so I've seen them cut the fries, so I know they're taking potatoes and running through machine cutting the fries, but I lump them in with the taste more like a fast food chain, like the people who get frozen patties like McDonald's and Burger King, but In-N-Out does not do that.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Yeah, In-N-Out is very good, but I think as we said the last episode, I wonder if the reason I like it so much is just because I can never have it.
Casey:
And if it was somewhere, if it was like Five Guys where I could consume it all the time, I'd be like, well, actually like Five Guys, and I'd be, eh.
John:
Yeah, I had In-N-Out two times in one week, and by the second time I was like, hmm, all right, novelty's wearing off.
Casey:
Yep, completely agree.
Casey:
That's what I did when I was in California, and I felt the exact same way.
Casey:
Man, this is no fun when we agree with each other.
Casey:
So, yeah, screw Sbarro.
Marco:
Give it time.
Casey:
We'll get there.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about tech support ads being banned from Bing.
John:
A couple of shows back, I talked to my mom falling for a tech support scam, where, by the way, the consensus seems to be that what these tech support scams really want is not to steal your information or put ransomware on your machine, although those are all definitely possible and I'm sure have happened.
John:
But percentage wise, it seems like.
John:
The thing that most of them are doing is trying to scare you into thinking your computer has something wrong with it and getting you to sign up to a monthly fee for them to essentially do nothing.
John:
So they make your computer seem like it's haunted and say, oh, you have a serious problem here.
John:
If you pay us $5 a month, we'll make sure your computer stays clean.
John:
So it's a slightly different kind of fraudulent scam than the kind that installs a rootkit or malware, but...
John:
uh you can never know which one of those things you're doing and uh my mother hung up on this person uh be you know without before finding out exactly what the scam was and so wiping her computer was the best thing to do but anyway uh the story recently was that bing microsoft's still existing apparently competitor to google search uh is now banning all third-party tech support services
John:
from bing ads like you know the ads they serve with the search results just because so many of them are fraudulent so it's an entire category of business that is that cannot advertise on bing now again advertising on bing maybe is not the biggest thing in the world uh but google has done similar things in trying to find trying to get businesses that are fraudulent stop them from buying keywords or ads because as we all know in these search results a lot of the times the first few items are actually ads and not legitimate search results and most people
John:
i've found are not good at distinguishing what's an ad from what's not even though they're like clearly labeled or in boxes or whatever uh and i have no doubt that the thing my mother clicked on was not actually a search result uh but an ad because i know she doesn't know the difference between those two things just one of the top hits all right so anyway it's sad that this entire what could be an entire legitimate category of businesses of like oh you have problems with your computer there's a market need we can help you with your problems instead they're all just scams and so they're just banned completely pretty crappy
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And a lot of people wrote in with regard to our conversation about podcasting last episode, and many, many tinfoil hats were worn as emails were sent in saying, oh, obviously Apple is the source of that New York Times podcasting story.
Casey:
It's so clear.
Casey:
I didn't think that was the case, but I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, did you have any thoughts on that?
Marco:
I mean, it didn't paint Apple in a very good light, so I don't think they would have been the source of that story.
Marco:
Also, things that are Apple-controlled leaks tend to read a certain way.
Marco:
Also, I can't recall a time that the New York Times was publishing those.
Marco:
It seems like Apple's controlled leaks in recent years have gone to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, usually.
Marco:
So I think it's pretty unlikely, basically.
John:
yeah i completely agree yeah and especially since like the idea was that uh you know like i was saying in the past show all these things that they're suggesting would just give apple tremendous amount of power and that's bad for podcasters and that was what's leading people to say oh well if it gives apple tremendous power and it's bad for podcasters don't stop thinking about it as isn't it weird that podcasters would say that think about it oh this is exactly what apple would want but if apple wanted to grab power in the podcast market
John:
A, it could have done that years ago, and B, it doesn't need to leak anything to do it.
John:
It would just have to do it.
John:
So I don't see the purpose of that leak, even if the dastardly Apple did want to own podcasting, which they totally have seemed like they don't, and they don't need the New York Times to do that.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems like what we already knew, which is that...
Marco:
Apple is a very big player in podcasting, but it's not really top of their radar.
Marco:
It's not a huge priority for them.
Marco:
They have much bigger things to deal with.
Marco:
And I don't see that changing.
Marco:
Seeing what Apple has to deal with with their other product lines, various market pressures, various internal and external needs...
Marco:
podcasting is just not very high ranking on that list and i don't see that changing for the foreseeable future it might you know way down the road but i i really wouldn't assume that it's going to suddenly become a big thing for them
Marco:
We are
Marco:
Tell a package delivery person, hey, leave it on the doorstep.
Marco:
I'm in the shower, even if you're at work.
Marco:
And then you can have a package left.
Marco:
All sorts of good reasons why you'd want a video doorbell.
Marco:
There's also incredibly advanced motion detection here so that even if somebody doesn't ring your doorbell, ring can turn itself on and alert you that somebody is at your door or looking around your door or looking around your porch or wherever you have it aimed.
Marco:
And this can actually help you both deter and prevent home break-ins.
Marco:
And they've actually run studies.
Marco:
They've actually been able to decrease the rate of home break-ins in neighborhoods that have a bunch of Ring video doorbells installed.
Marco:
And home break-ins usually happen during the day.
Marco:
That's when people aren't home.
Marco:
So this can really help out a lot.
Marco:
Installing Ring is very easy.
Marco:
It takes only minutes.
Marco:
It can either work with your current wiring or they have a built-in rechargeable battery model.
Marco:
So John, you have one of these, right?
John:
oh i installed mine i got the they sent me one of the just the camera ones that's not the doorbell thing well that's interesting what is that it's just wrapped up with like a mounting bracket that you can kind of stick anywhere and aim up and aim down and you know so you don't have to put it where your doorbell be and it doesn't have a button on it it's basically just a camera and i put it uh guess what facing my driveway because that's what i wanted to do with these things
John:
have you caught anybody sneaking around your car yet uh no just uh us every time we come home and the kids go out and and you know stuff like that so i'm still i'm observing it i mean it works fine i'm amazed at how long the battery is lasting i guess like it's basically off or asleep the entire time and then when you trip the ir sensor it turns on i think it's still like 90 battery it's been out there for like five days and it sends alerts to my ios devices when there's motion and i can look at it and uh you know i can see my daughter scraping her bicycle against the side of my car it's great yeah
John:
i kind of feel bad though for my kids because think about it when you were a kid like you could get away with a lot of stuff if your parents didn't see it now i literally have a video camera catching them you know scraping their bike against the side of my car i feel kind of bad they they can't deny i'm like look i've got video let's come look at it together see how the bike's not supposed to touch the car bad uh yeah so i feel bad but yeah that's that's their that's the non-front door product uh because again after my ipad ipod being stolen out of my car what i really wanted was to see
John:
what the deal is and so far no one has come to visit my car as far as i've been able to determine also my ipod has not been stolen from my car so yet thumbs up so far yeah uh maybe just the presence of the camera will deter people kind of like this fake uh security signs that you put on your lawn or on your windows when you don't actually have a security system but this is a real camera uh so it is it is mostly filming my family now but it's fun
Casey:
I thought a lot about what you were saying about getting away with things because especially when it came to like driving, I did terrible things in my 1994.
Casey:
Well, actually, it was dad's 1994 Saturn SL2 that really was not designed to do the terrible things I did with it.
Marco:
Hold that thought.
Marco:
Our next sponsor is automatic.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
But suffice to say, if Find My Friends or whatever was a thing or Glimpse was a thing back when I was 16, I would have had a very different childhood than I did.
Marco:
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Marco:
That's ring.com slash ATP for free fast shipping.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Ring for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Alright, so this was discussed a bit on the latest Under the Radar, which I almost accidentally called Under the Weather.
Casey:
But App Store Approval Times... You're always making fun of me for being sick.
Casey:
I know, seriously.
Casey:
I actually meant to ask you if you were sick right now.
Casey:
Are you sick right now?
Marco:
I think it's on its way out.
Casey:
Okay, so on episode 27 of your Under the Weather program, you discussed fast app review, and it's worth at least quickly touching upon here.
Casey:
App store review times, which typically hovered at about a week, are now really, really fast.
Casey:
So Cable Sasser tweeted earlier tonight, Logan sent a non-panic app to the Mac App Store at 1030.
Casey:
I'm assuming that's IM.
Casey:
It was in review at 3, rejected for a crash at 530.
Casey:
They fixed it, submitted at 630, approved at 8 o'clock.
Casey:
So in the span of, what is that, 10 hours?
Casey:
They made two submissions and got their app approved.
Casey:
That's impressive.
Marco:
And in fact, I can also confirm that this morning I submitted an Overcast update, and it was approved and in the store nine hours later.
John:
I didn't listen to the Developing Under the Weather Perspective podcast about this.
John:
But when I think about it, a lot of people are asking, like, oh, does this have to do with Phil Schiller?
John:
Maybe it does, so on and so forth.
John:
Like, how is this possible?
John:
And there are so many ways that it could be possible, but the ones that spring to mind to me are...
John:
you can use heuristics to assess the risk of each application submission.
John:
And what you can mix into those heuristics are, uh, how many apps does this developer put in?
John:
Have we had any problems before?
John:
Is this a entirely new app or is this an update to an existing one?
John:
I mean, they can go down to the point where they're doing like binary diffs or something, but it's a whole mess of heuristics you can do.
John:
And of course they're just hiring more people, but the, but this dramatic decreased from like days to hours is,
John:
I don't think you can do that by even like hiring 10 times as many people.
John:
They must they must be having better rules about like, how much do we have to scrutinize this or how much can we automate?
John:
I mean, increased automation is another thing.
John:
But again, it seems like it would have to come out of nowhere.
John:
When a developer who's never had any problems, this is what we've always been talking about, a developer who's never had any problems, who's conscientious, who's submitting an app that looks fairly straightforward, to get them through in this one-day turnaround time where you pass it, it gets rejected, you fix it, you pass it, and it goes back out again.
John:
There's just not enough time in there to give it a huge amount of scrutiny and go through every single screen and do all this stuff.
John:
Even automated testing tools could take... You could run through automated testing for a certain amount of time and maybe that wouldn't even fit in.
John:
This is almost like they're saying...
John:
this one's probably fine right guys run the fast automated tests give it a once over for two seconds and let it sail through which is what developers have been asking they're like and again this wasn't a panic app but panic it was saying like look seriously apple uh you know are we burying malware in our applications like you're never going to catch it if we do anyway so you might as well just accept the reality that the only thing you can really do is assume good intent and punish after the fact
John:
right because if you say oh we don't like that that's not a secure way to do we want to we want to stop that stuff from getting to the store in the first place a that's not possible and b it just punishes everybody for the possibility they might suddenly turn one day and panic becomes infected by malware even through no fault of their own like so they get hacked and someone sticks malware into the map app there's only so much that you can detect in review so you know the calculus may be
John:
you know develop these heuristics so that most normal developers get there we do less we do less review basically for most normal developers and we'll catch them after the fact because history has proven that you catch tons of stuff after the fact anyway tons of things get through even obvious things that that should have been caught so why pretend that your entire system is predicated on the idea that we must catch bad things before they get through to the store at all costs and then take a day or a
John:
Uh, this is definitely awesome.
John:
And I have to think that it has been, uh, that it's happening because they're just getting, they're, they're working smarter, not harder as they say, as the evil bosses say.
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's dramatic.
Marco:
And yeah, we talked about it a lot on Under the Radar last week.
Marco:
The gist of it basically... I mean, for those of you who don't know, AppReview used to take roughly a week.
Marco:
And throughout the entire history of the App Store going back to 2008, there have been a couple of ups and downs here and there.
Marco:
But for the most part, it's been pretty consistent at taking about a week.
Marco:
When AppReview goes from taking a week to a day or less...
Marco:
it makes a lot of app review problems less severe and it makes it basically lets you iterate faster on your software and so yes it does create the potential to kind of play fast and loose and ship more bugs but it also gives you the ability to fix bugs faster and so i have to imagine it's going to lead overall to better quality software and it has certainly led to better quality better developer morale and better developer feelings towards the platform and
Marco:
As the economics have gotten more challenging over the years, I think that's something that Apple is right to be apparently focusing on because the App Store, it's pretty easy to become bitter after a while in the App Store when you're trying to sell something or trying to make some money because it just gets harder and harder every year as there's increasing competition from everywhere.
Marco:
And so to have signs that Apple is trying to make our lives better as developers is very promising.
Marco:
And this kind of thing is a huge improvement to being an iOS developer.
Marco:
It's an improvement that I don't think any of us were expecting to ever get.
Marco:
And all of a sudden, it's just kind of here.
John:
It's going to be on a slide of WWDC, I would imagine.
John:
But yeah, there are still remaining problems.
John:
The main one I can think of is you've been developing an app for a while, releasing updates to it on a regular schedule.
John:
And then along the way, if you're lucky, just a routine update.
John:
But if you're unlucky, a bug fix update gets hung up, as they say.
John:
something fundamental about your app is against the rules.
John:
And you're like, I've been releasing this app for a year.
John:
This is like the 17th update.
John:
And all of a sudden, the major feature of my application is a violation of the guidelines.
John:
And that's preventing me from getting this bug fix update or this routine update out the door.
John:
Fast review doesn't help that.
John:
Because no matter how fast you iterate on that, you still... The second problem is, can I...
John:
connect to a human being who understands the words that my mouth is making right now like i nothing fundamental has changed about my app this app has existed for a long time are you telling me that the end this app is no longer welcome in the store tell me now i will cease development or are you telling me
John:
you don't understand something basic about my app and i need to explain it to you and those type of situations with like the wall of silence and just trying to send it back again and again and getting computerized responses fast iteration time doesn't help with that kind of frustration because then you're like blocked on something like i don't understand i'm trying to fix a crashing bug and you're telling me my application that's been on the store for a year is now like illegal for some you know so that frustration can still exist with fast iteration time but boy like marco said
John:
having the time get faster whole messes of complaints and things that people like gnashed their teeth about about the app store just go away when the time scales shrink to a single day then it's like a mild annoyance versus like i have to plan my entire business about around allowing for a week to a month of review time which is just just destroys your you know your ability to like just go to market to compete to to uh
John:
To serve your customers, like if there's a problem with the 1.0 and you got to wait a week for the 1.01.
John:
Boy, I really hope this does stick.
Marco:
What will be promising is if Apple publicly acknowledges this in any way at all.
John:
WWDC, man.
John:
You think they're not going to brag about this?
John:
How can they not?
John:
This is going to be a graph.
John:
right but if they if they don't mention it at all it could plausibly be like a fluke it was an accident someone was just hitting the approve button repeatedly like the little drinking bird from the simpsons i understood that reference me too i told you it was from the simpsons though yeah but again i keep giving you the references you're like oh is that from the simpsons well you had i mean we know what the drinking bird is separately i know i know i know so you kind of had to sound it just sounds weird to me
Casey:
you're like a show business mom man you're impossible to please no wire hangers that that one i didn't get no that's not a show business mom no is it is that that was a mommy dearest but i don't think it was a show biz angle on that yeah it went right over my head and everything is back to normal again
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This gives you real-time performance data, all the diagnostic stuff I mentioned earlier.
Marco:
It can even use intelligent coaching to maximize your fuel economy and reduce wear and tear.
Marco:
So, for example, you can say, if I am getting fuel economy below this target that I want to hit,
Marco:
Beep at me or tell me so that I can like, you know, adjust the habit I'm doing.
Marco:
If I just gave my teenage son Casey the car for the night and Casey decides to drive super fast, I can have a report of that.
Casey:
A 1994 Saturn SL2 does never go.
Casey:
It never goes fast.
Casey:
It just goes quicker than the roads intended.
Casey:
That's all.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
They also have a web app dashboard that provides granular information, lets you import and export data, gives you the plain English explanations for your check engine light.
Marco:
They also have this incredible app platform.
Marco:
Now, when you have smarts and you have connectivity, you can have integration.
Marco:
So I mentioned earlier the Nest integration.
Marco:
There's also integration with UR Mechanic, FreshBooks, and more.
Marco:
You can file business expenses with popular apps like Concur and Expensify, and it works with IFTTT for even more possibilities than
Marco:
And they never sell your data.
Marco:
That's not their business.
Marco:
Their business is selling you the automatic device.
Marco:
So the automatic device is normally $99.95, $100.
Marco:
but when you use our special offer code ATP0315, you'll save 20%.
Marco:
That makes it just 80 bucks with code ATP0315.
Marco:
So go to automatic.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP0315 to save 20% off the regular purchase price.
Marco:
It gets to you for just 80 bucks.
Marco:
That's automatic.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot for supporting the show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Google I O's keynote was today and I actually watched it, which is the first time I think I've ever watched a Google I O keynote.
Casey:
But now that I'm in this whole brand new world where I work alongside Android developers and they were really into it and they did what I usually do for Apple keynotes and we all piled in a conference room and they put it on the big screen and we watched it together.
Casey:
And
Casey:
It was pretty good, all in all, and we'll go through each thing in a moment.
Casey:
But I was impressed.
Casey:
I had heard rumblings in descriptions of past Google IOs that they were meandering and long and often boring, much like the tail end of the last WWDC keynote.
Yeah.
Marco:
and um and a total disaster kind of like the end of the last wwdc keynote and well so i'm curious i was talking about this uh recently with tiff which do you think was the worst moment in recent apple keynote memory was it the apple music introduction or the u2 album finger touch thing
John:
well finger touch was nothing compared to the end of last year's wwc are you kidding finger touch was a brief moment kind of silly excusable by celebrity the other was just interminable watching eddie q vamp and then having to have drake be up there and just ramble and it was it was bad
Marco:
But to keep in mind, though, I think contributing to the other side of the argument, though, is like the finger touch was part of a very, very awkward moment that then also led into this giant thing nobody wanted, which is everybody getting this album pushed into there.
John:
It was fine.
Marco:
You like you, too.
John:
it doesn't matter and even if you don't it was fine it was it was a fumble but who cares they gave you free stuff and it took up space in your phone and they gave you a way to opt out of it and it was silly but like you're talking about the keynote itself finger touch is nothing i don't know man i'm kind of with marco on this i think it was an approximately equivalent amount of awkward it's just that the density in the finger touch was considerable if we had to make you watch one of those things over again if you have to watch the finger touch you have to watch the entire eddie q and drake segment which do you choose
Marco:
Would I have to watch the U2 performance before the finger touch?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think it's included.
John:
I don't know.
John:
If you're including the musical performance, there's been a long line of musical performance that people don't care about.
John:
I put all these notes in here about Google I.O.
John:
because I was trying not to talk about the showmanship or compare it to Apple because the outdoor thing, the set decoration on that stage was not good.
Casey:
Well, hold on.
Casey:
Can we paint a word picture, please?
John:
i don't want to paint the word picture i gotta bring up the i thought i had the video out here i don't know what their decorating theme was was it like material chaos was that the theme of the stage i can see the material design colors kind of i can see that theme uh and you kind of saw it echoed in their slides but the the set design for the stage just was not aesthetically pleasing and didn't enhance they had these enhanced their presentation they had these bright colored lights underneath the screen like
John:
I just want to focus on your content.
John:
The content I thought was pretty good, and I really liked a lot of the things they announced, but the set duration was gross.
John:
But anyway, my point is I don't want to talk about the set decoration or how polished the presenters were or whether or not Drake wore a vintage Apple jacket while he said nothing of interest or if Eddie Q danced.
John:
You have to give Google that and other people try to dance.
John:
He did.
John:
Anyway, I want to talk about the products because I thought there was a lot of cool stuff.
John:
yeah i mean there was there was siri there was the echo oh don't even try don't even try to say they're just doing things that other people are doing because that is ridiculous argument that is the only thing i give you that on is split screen uh because i was really expecting them to have something more than exactly what apple has split screen picture in picture but anyway we're getting ahead of ourselves but yeah there's that's not an exact apple rip uh i actually i give them an okay on that but
Marco:
um we will go in the order of the show notes and it begins with google home which is the amazon echo slash alexa product but google see this actually like i'm this might be really good it's obviously a big risk you know because first of all it's google doing its own hardware and their record for that is about as good as amazon's record is for the for amazon doing its own hardware so like
Marco:
They have had some things that have worked.
Marco:
Some of the Nexuses have been decent.
Marco:
But a lot of their stuff has been flops.
Marco:
And so it's a huge wild card.
John:
Let's separate the flop from as in they don't sell a lot of them from is the hardware actually good.
John:
Because I think Google has probably done multiples of both.
John:
Like I think that ball thing, I don't know if it ever shipped or whatever.
John:
That was like not a good idea.
John:
But a lot of the things they make don't sell a lot better.
John:
But it's not like they're bad.
John:
I mean, I don't think they sell, I don't know, even like the Chromebook Pixel.
John:
How many Chromebook Pixels do they sell?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But the hardware wasn't terrible, right?
John:
No, not at all.
John:
I thought the hardware looked great.
John:
And the same thing, you know, the tablets and all the Nexus phones, especially like the Nexus phones didn't sell that many, you know, I think Google thought they were going to sell more than they did, and then the other vendors took over.
John:
But...
John:
The hardware they actually make, I don't think is bad hardware.
John:
So I have some vague hope that this little squat little Weeble that's their Amazon Echo competitor.
Casey:
Everything is a Weeble to you.
John:
It's shaped like a Weeble.
John:
They wobble, they don't fall down, right?
Casey:
How many times have you made that joke on our shows?
John:
About a thousand.
John:
People need to know about the Weebles.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Please don't make me tell you again about the Weebles.
John:
But no, this is literally Weeble-shaped, right?
John:
It's fat on the bottom, and it's like... Anyway.
LAUGHTER
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I have some faith that the hardware will be okay.
John:
I don't think that's been the problem with Google's hardware products is that the hardware is bad.
John:
I feel like they've just, you know, fallen down another route, like the Google TV stuff.
John:
I mean, maybe, you know, that ridiculous remote, was it made badly?
John:
No, it was just a bad idea.
John:
So if it's a good idea, then I feel like they can make it
John:
you know reasonably well i i think i have i've seen no reason why this device shouldn't sell uh just as well as the amazon echo unless the amazon echo has already tied up that entire market which is possible but other than that the people who bought the echo why wouldn't they buy this too it's like the same thing
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, really, like, this kind of thing is the kind of thing that Google should be really good at.
Marco:
And again, this isn't to say that they definitely will, but I think they clearly are likely to succeed here because it combines the types of things they're really good at with the kind of market that they can get in and succeed in, which is like...
Marco:
So far, mostly a geeky market, a very tech-savvy market of people who have smart home stuff.
Marco:
The main problem they're going to have is the lack of retail presence.
Marco:
Because we've seen Amazon is so powerful.
Marco:
Amazon is the place where most people would go to buy this kind of thing.
Marco:
And I'm sure Amazon's not going to be too happy to carry it.
Marco:
Or if they do carry it, they're certainly not going to ever promote it.
Marco:
But I'm guessing they won't carry it at all.
Marco:
So this is going to be interesting to see how Google can try to market this and sell the crap out of this.
Marco:
Because from a technical perspective...
John:
google should be better than amazon at this stuff i don't know that they will be but they should be yeah i i i expect them to be better because i mean the only thing i feel like they might not be better at is maybe this is their first try at putting something out that has 10 microphones and all sorts of noise canceling stuff so maybe amazon well it was amazon's first try and they got it right i know i know but they it's been out for a while and the quality is really good so i think they they basically that amazon hit it out of the park in that particular feature right
John:
So I don't think that's a given for your first try.
John:
I think Amazon did a really good job with does this thing understand me from across the room.
John:
Google says they do a good job with that, but they like Amazon had an exemplary first try.
John:
Right.
John:
And they have the second and third try with the dot and all that other whatever the derivative products.
John:
But I think they did a really good job.
John:
But other than that, everything else about this.
John:
google i think should be better and will be better like things that you can say to it natural language processing back-end querying the only thing amazon's gonna be better at is buying stuff right because but every other part of it google damn well better be better than amazon at it because you know amazon doesn't have any of the the the strength behind it to do all the language processing and search querying and the deep hooks into all that type of stuff
John:
Um, and the thing that really blew me away about this demo was, well, a thinking about why the hell does Apple not have one of these things yet?
John:
I guess maybe it's beneath their concern, but B when they did the thing, like, uh, the kids talking to it and doing the conversation says, show me on the TV.
John:
It's like, that is an Apple move.
John:
how can we do that because we make a tv device and of course our little weeble knows about the tv the chromecast attached to tv show me on the tv like that is the type of thing we used to have to be in the apple ecosystem for which is oh i have tons of apple crap around the house and they all know about each other and they all just work together uh and it's it's like airplay to your apple tv the first time that worked it was like oh this is amazing because i have these two apple devices they're really easy to put video up on my tv
John:
well it's the only time that worked yeah i know but i'm just kidding that was the first time you know it was impressive the first time and yet this is google saying hey we actually have stuff around here and they put the little nest icon on there to say connect to your thermostat and third party they integrate with your third party lights and stuff like that they're not being like apple where it only would only work with your apple lights or whatever they're all big on third party integration they already announced an api which we still don't have for siri for for developers uh
John:
Unless unless Google Home, unless this is the Nest hub that we read about and all those tell articles about Nest, about how Nest was going down in flames and everything was breaking.
John:
I really hope this is not the long delayed hub from the Nest people because a dysfunctional organization is not going to make a good product.
John:
But assuming this is made by a functioning organization.
John:
Uh, I, I think this will be an impressive product and I, I think I might actually get one.
John:
I've been holding off on the echo just because it's the first generation product or whatever.
John:
Uh, but if this gets really good reviews, I think the reason I will buy it is because I basically, I have more faith in Google than Amazon in terms of, uh, supporting and evolving this product and being good at the more interesting, sophisticated parts of it.
Marco:
Well, the downside, though, I mean, the kind of argument to that, first of all, there is the big privacy question which we should address.
Marco:
Because a lot of people, like, you know, I was one of these people.
Marco:
I freaked out when Amazon released the Echo.
Marco:
And I was like, you're going to let Amazon put a speaker and a microphone in your house that's listening to everything you say all the time?
Marco:
And similarly, you know, when Google bought Nest, everyone's like...
Marco:
You want Google to own this thermostat that can look in your house and stuff.
Marco:
And there's a lot of people, my past self included, who are uncomfortable with that.
Marco:
And they're just not going to want that product in their house.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
That's your decision.
Marco:
For me, what tipped the scale is what every Google fan usually says when asked about privacy things, which is basically what tipped the scale for me with letting the Amazon Echo in my house was I saw how good it was.
Marco:
other people's houses like i saw how good it was and i decided you know what it's worth the trade-off i'll take the risk i'll put this thing in my kitchen because it is so good that it's worth the trade-off and this is the same thing that most google people say when you know when they say like you know when if people like me ask them like you know why do you want google to have access to all your data and to be analyzing everything you do and
Marco:
and selling ads against it and everything and the answer i get most commonly is well it's worth it to me because it's convenient and these features are things that i want so i've made that decision and you know i can't really argue with that if you know if you decide it's worth it to you then it's worth it to you i have it just to clarify uh where i fall on that uh
John:
I don't see it as a trade-off as in like, okay, well, there are detriments, but there are benefits.
John:
I mean, I know the trade-off is there, but I would put it more succinctly for myself is that basically I trust Google.
John:
I don't trust them with everything.
John:
I don't trust them implicitly.
John:
I don't give them all of my trust.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, I trust Apple and I trust Google to basically be companies that are trying to do the right thing and are not like...
John:
just inherently evil like i don't know insert the name of your favorite company although it's it's weird that i was just about to say oracle but don't read anything into that anyway i mean i would trust google before i trust facebook oh yeah great example right or even i trust amazon you know for the most part uh and again i don't trust them entirely i you have to be vigilant and so on and so forth don't say oh
John:
Oh, I just trust them to listen to everything in my house.
John:
They're never going to do anything evil, never going to sell me the advertisers like I trust them in that I kind of I know what they're going to do.
John:
I know what they're about.
John:
But in general, still, the company seems to me to be mostly trying to do the right thing.
John:
And as long as you understand their business and how much advertising is a part of it and what is probably going to happen to all your data.
John:
And the fact that the U.S.
John:
government is probably going to have hooks into all this stuff and they're not going to tell you about like as long as you go on with a clear head.
John:
The bottom line is that I I I trust that this is not I'm not like backdooring my entire house forever and ever.
John:
um and i you know and i wouldn't install a device from a company that i trusted less or a company that was less competent or more likely to go out of business or more likely to get to do something in desperation for money you know what i mean like there's so many things for me in favor of google so yes it is a trade-off but mostly what it comes down to is that uh you know i trust google enough to put something like this in my house
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I spoke about, I think, that I am a brand new Google Photos user.
Casey:
And the more I use this app, both the web app and the native apps, the more I like it and the more it amazes me.
Casey:
And quickly during the keynote, they said, oh, and, you know, Google Photos does some incredible things.
Casey:
And I think it's, what, 200 million active users on it or something like that, whatever the number is.
Casey:
But you can even search for something like hugs.
Casey:
And, of course, in the room I'm in, it was half Android developers or mostly Android developers and a couple of others.
Casey:
And so I immediately hopped on Google Photos and typed in hugs.
Casey:
And sure enough, there are a bunch of people hugging each other, like usually Aaron and me and Declan, that show up immediately.
Casey:
Like the stuff that Google Photos does is amazing.
Casey:
And seeing how good it is makes me wonder, man, if they're this good with photos, I wonder how good they would be with this Google Home thing.
Casey:
So I agree with you, John, that this...
Casey:
The Google Photos has kind of been my gateway drug back into Google.
Casey:
I still use Gmail for both work and personal mail, but that's just kind of a thing in the background.
Casey:
I don't ever use the web app.
Casey:
It's all just basically IMAP to me.
Casey:
But man, Google Photos has really changed my tune as to how I think about Google these days.
Casey:
And I'm giving some serious positive side eye to this Google Home thing because it's aesthetically pleasing.
Casey:
Be it a Weeble or not, it still looks good.
Casey:
And
Casey:
So I'm tentatively interested in what this brings in a way that I haven't really been in the Echo.
John:
And not to bring this back to food again, but one of the demos they did show was talking – maybe this was – yeah, I think this was in this one – talking about –
John:
I think it gets into the Aloe thing later, but it's all tied up in the same sort of natural language processing type where they're asking questions of these products and having it do things for you.
John:
And they always want to demo those because they always want to show.
John:
I think they had the video of like an entire family talking to the Google Home device, which is a little bit overblown because like, you know, the impression you get is this entire family spends its entire day living in the same house, but all their words are addressed towards the inanimate object instead of the other people, which...
John:
You kind of get that because you have to fit in lots of examples of uses in a single two-minute commercial.
John:
Anyway, that aside, a lot of what the things they're doing is trying to sell the fantasy that it's like a personal assistant where...
John:
flight is delayed and you want to move your dinner reservations and you just wanted to handle things for you and i i think those make for good good demos but also bad demos because i think they raise expectations unreasonable levels because every time they do something like that i see sort of like scrolling down the side of my virtual screen like all the cascading number of assumptions that are in there that your restaurant has an open table reservation that it understands that you know
John:
that the restaurant thing you're talking about, that it knows about your flight, that you didn't use a different email address for this, that it wasn't sent to a different person, that just so many things have to go right for that to work.
John:
And they make it seem like you don't have to worry about or care about those, but you do.
John:
Because if you're flying on an airline that doesn't have integration in the same way, or you want to go to a restaurant that doesn't support OpenTable, or something was done on a spouse's account and not yours, so you're talking to it, but it doesn't understand...
John:
uh it doesn't know anything about that flight because it's done through a different google id or you know like so many possible things can go wrong to make that not work and when they do go wrong even in the slightest way it's like the old you know give up and use tables website it's like if anything goes wrong at all all right forget it i'll just do it on my phone or i'll sit down in front of the computer because
John:
There's no way I'm trying to have an argument and getting into the text adventure syntax game with this thing.
John:
So it all looks magical.
John:
And the same thing with, like, ordering food.
John:
Oh, the food will be waiting for you to get home.
John:
Food from where?
John:
You want curry?
John:
It found an Indian restaurant?
John:
You're just accepting the restaurant that it gave you?
John:
What if you don't like that restaurant?
John:
Does it learn which restaurant you like?
John:
Does it, like...
John:
they're they're still this is so primitive where it's not i don't feel like it's going to help me with my life unless i just don't care where things come from want the most generic things like i wanted to know i always get indian food from this place um or if it's not sure or they should ask me do you want to get it from the place you got it last time and this all predicated on the fact that it can order from those places you probably can't because your favorite engineering place has no idea what computers are and they only take cash and it's it
John:
It just doesn't... We're not there yet.
John:
And these ads make it seem like they are there.
John:
But I don't know anybody, except like Mike Mattis, maybe, who can actually live this life where you just talk into the air and everything you do is exactly integrated.
John:
And, well, he wouldn't like it either because he would have to know exactly where everything's coming from.
John:
You can't just say, order me Indian food.
John:
Is this safe, Casey?
John:
Can we talk about Indian food?
John:
You can't just say, order me Indian food and they'll be waiting for you and you'll be happy.
John:
Order what?
John:
What do you want to order from where?
John:
Like, it just...
John:
it grinds my gears to see that but anyway i i do have confidence that google is going to be better at this natural language stuff than amazon just because they have so many smart people doing this and amazon probably has a smaller slightly smaller number of smart people doing this well but amazon has has i think two big strengths i mean number one first of all as i mentioned they have massive retail power here to push these things and
Marco:
By all accounts, the Echo probably already has a decent-sized install base.
Marco:
So that's barrier number one for Google to try to overcome.
Marco:
You can overcome the head start the Echo has gotten with a good product, but it's going to be really hard to overcome the massive retail and promotional advantage.
Marco:
Just ask anybody who has tried to make a successful, technically advanced e-reader in the last eight years or so.
John:
But Google has a big in there because Google Home, who cares if the little turd, that's now turd, downgraded from Weeble, ever sells.
John:
Because all this, the same thing is all powered by the whole Google Assistant thing.
John:
And that's going to be on all their phones.
John:
And they have a ton of phones.
John:
So that is their, that is their wedge, basically.
John:
Like, look, maybe the home never beats out the Echo.
John:
But if we can make this a thing on all of our phones so that, you know, the 50% plus of the world that has Android smartphones gets used to using this on their phones.
John:
Then they'll still win because, again, the phone is going to swamp how many people bought a little silly cylinder, even if people are just shouting across the room to their phones and people start adding multiple microphones on phones.
John:
So you're right that it is a barrier.
John:
But Google already has like a beachhead there.
John:
They have a way around.
John:
Like, I think Google cares less whether Google Home succeeds.
John:
than whether this assistive technology becomes sort of what Google is known for in the modern era instead of just web search.
John:
That's fair.
Marco:
Well, so the other, I think, advantage that Amazon has right now is that the Echo is not trying to be that kind of like super smart fantasy California land, you know, order for Indian food and it just magically does exactly the right thing you want.
Marco:
Like the Echo is more like a really simple command line.
Marco:
And once you learn the relatively small vocabulary and syntax that it supports, it's incredibly reliable doing those things.
Marco:
And so I think while it might at first have a slightly higher learning curve for like day one, two, three, I think once you get past the very, very initial part of it, I would say the Echo is actually easier to use.
Marco:
Because once you figure out the kind of things that work with it, those things work incredibly reliably.
Marco:
And so that's the challenge that anybody has come into this.
Marco:
Like I think Siri doesn't do as well at that because Siri tries to do more.
Marco:
It doesn't have an API.
Marco:
That too.
Marco:
Siri tries to do more, but it doesn't really do any of them reliably enough.
Marco:
And it's hard to know before you ask Siri something, it's hard to know whether you will succeed or not.
Marco:
Whereas with the Echo, you figure it out within a few days.
Marco:
You figure out like, okay, this is the kind of thing that will succeed.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that won't.
Marco:
Google is obviously trying to be very ambitious with the kinds of things that their thing can do, that Google Home can do.
Marco:
We will see if it works.
Marco:
I think if anybody can do that kind of complexity, it's them.
Marco:
So it might work.
Marco:
To me, I think the biggest risk for buying into the Google Home ecosystem is...
Marco:
is whether Google themselves will lose interest or it will fail within a few years.
Marco:
Because their track record for that isn't great either.
Marco:
If something is not working, they're the first ones to kill it, usually.
Marco:
Just don't tell them that FeedBurner is still running, because I think they forgot about it.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
Google is, if you look at the history of various initiatives they've had, various big platforms they've tried to launch, it's a huge graveyard of stuff they've shut down.
Casey:
But that's no different than Amazon.
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
But if they try this out, if it doesn't get very far in the market, they could choose to fight harder and to keep it going or to shut it down.
Marco:
And if you bought the wrong hardware and they shut yours down, that kind of sucks.
Marco:
It's kind of like a format war going on.
John:
But don't you think this has a big advantage in that the underlying technology, which is underlying this and Allo and all that stuff, the underlying sort of machine intelligence, natural language processing speech interface, that I feel like is a core technological...
John:
effort at google that is not going away like 100 guaranteed not going away right now the individual products you're right maybe they get to google home and it ends up like oh we have the second version and it's not compatible and you're stuck with some bad hardware and they eventually stop supporting it i could totally see that happening that's a danger in any sort of product like this and they're you know historically like i said have not been particularly good about preserving that but if you're going to have any faith in any kind of product efforts it's not going to be like the the weather balloons that give you wi-fi or the self-driving cars is going to be
John:
the natural extension of basically the google's core product which is search which is taking that to the next level also because it ties into advertising if you're going to be honest like why would google stick with this type of effort a they've been doing it for years right and b it totally fits with web search both web search and advertising so i have to think that this effort will continue to go on and if these products are like that they will iterate on them that they will
John:
They will make future versions of them and will keep going.
John:
And there is still a slim chance that you buy some hardware.
John:
It might be orphaned because they bail on that and have a new iteration with a new name or whatever.
John:
But I really think this is not esoteric or in fear of being a flash in the pan simply because it just reads so much as Google to be not tangential.
John:
Like I feel like this is if you were to say, what is Google like 50 years in the future?
John:
It looks less like type meetings and text boxes and more like a much better version of this because it's just such a natural extension.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And certainly, what was it?
Casey:
Machine learning was their version of customer sat.
Casey:
Like if we were doing a drinking game and machine learning caused you to drink, you would have been under the table after the first 20 minutes because that's all we heard about.
Casey:
And I mean, Apple has its own foibles in very similar ways like customer sat.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Machine learning was all over this keynote.
Casey:
And I agree with you, John, that that seems to be where they're pushing as a company is trying to leverage that machine learning in any possible way that they can.
Casey:
And in some of those ways, like I've been talking about with Google Photos and with Google Home, I think it looks really promising and really, really interesting.
John:
Yeah, and it's their logo or their motto or revision state or whatever, like organizing the world's information.
John:
They've been slowly but steadily doing that over the course of many, many years, trying to get semantics into the information so it understands not just like, oh, this word...
John:
appears there and these people link to that page but understanding what the information is that it's actually looking at that's how it can do that photo stuff that doesn't the photo stuff doesn't just come out of nowhere because they did a one-year project to uh do it that's based on years and years of research outside google and within and just working on it working on their their language parsing they'd open source that big uh you know natural language processing uh thing and uh image recognition and stuff with robotics like this is all about taking in information and then developing and
John:
an understanding of it that can be encoded by computers so the computers can act on it so it's not just text so that they understand that there's meaning behind things is once you have even the barest meaning or the barest sort of sensory perception of like is this a car is this a hug uh what language is this in what do the words mean uh that previous sentence when they said he in the next sentence what are they talking about like it's really basic stuff conceptually but
John:
but it's really hard to do for computers and they're doing it on such a massive scale that that that effort and that research just is going to underlie all their products from from here going forward and maybe they're going to hit that inflection point where suddenly it becomes acceptable and uh and like it passes the barrier from tech curiosity that we're all impressed by that but then only nerds really use to just a normal thing that everybody does uh we may be getting close to that if only because
John:
people don't like typing stuff.
John:
I saw someone tweeting when the IO thing was going on, like how many people will they'll see interacting with their Android phones or their, you know, iOS devices purely by speech, even though a computer nerd looking at them would just cringe at how incredibly inefficient it is to essentially be arguing with your phone and saying things over and over again and trying to type things.
John:
Just just just give me your phone.
John:
Let me show you how to do this.
John:
But people prefer it, even when it's totally broken and crappy and doesn't work right.
John:
just because it's more comfortable for them so i think we're probably closer to the inflection point where most people use what will continue to be the most massively inefficient way to do anything especially when it has any sort of error simply because it's just more comfortable for them uh than trying to figure out what things to tap on or what to type
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Casey:
Let's talk about Ello, Governor.
Casey:
Oh, geez.
John:
You so wanted to say that.
John:
I know you so wanted to say it.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
I did.
Marco:
This is going to be the week of bad podcast British accents.
John:
At least they didn't put an apostrophe before the A. That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
Although it reminds me a lot of Ello, that weird social network that didn't go anywhere.
Marco:
It still spams me every few days with something.
John:
Yeah, you can unsubscribe for all those.
Marco:
I have.
Casey:
Anyway, so Google Hello is the iMessage knockoff, but with a lot more.
Casey:
It's not just straight.
John:
It's not an iMessage knockoff.
John:
It's like a Line knockoff or a WhatsApp knockoff.
John:
It's much more like the much more sophisticated messaging apps that are used outside the Apple ecosystem.
John:
It's got stickers, for crying out loud.
Yeah.
Casey:
Fair enough.
John:
Big text.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So actually, that was a very interesting interaction.
Casey:
So they went I forget which person was presenting.
Casey:
Was this the British woman that was presenting at this point?
Casey:
In any case, somebody whoever was presenting was talking about how there are times when you want to kind of shout in a text message conversation.
Casey:
There's times where you kind of want to whisper.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so they allow you to change the font size within Allo, which in and of itself doesn't seem that impressive, but I thought the interaction was pretty cool.
Casey:
Where on iOS in the Messages app, you have a little microphone icon and you can swipe up and down to like...
Casey:
What they do is they, if you tap and hold roughly where our microphone icon is, it'll let you kind of drag a slider up and down to change the size of the font, which I thought, again, was a very clever interaction.
Casey:
Right.
John:
so many things wrong with that from a usability perspective that i can't even like and from a taste perspective like this is just such a totally a google thing to do where someone thinks it's a cool feature and it seems like they don't think quite enough about the implications both aesthetically where you can make really ugly look even the demo screenshots were looking really ugly and i was thinking to myself nothing's any wrong with ugly and garish like if that's the aesthetic you're going for but i was thinking like
John:
this is the opposite of the apple aesthetic and it can be more fun like the apple aesthetic can be boring right you know oh everything is all helvetica and everything's the same size and everything is sort of clean and buttoned down like i you know i'm not i'm not slamming it i'm really not like but i i saw it i'm like wow this is definitely something that apple wouldn't do and for the shouting fine fun make your text bigger it's fun to shout so on and so forth whispering
John:
Not good for usability.
John:
You're telling me I can make the text microscopic?
John:
Boy, yeah, my aged relatives will love to squint at that when I, oh, you don't understand, Grandma, I'm whispering.
John:
No, you can't.
John:
I mean, maybe it's overridable at the local level, but it just doesn't make for a good demo because the obvious question, which is, really?
John:
I can make text so small that my recipient can't even read it and has to squint?
John:
That's the question in people's minds if they're looking at it from an accessibility perspective.
John:
So just throw a sentence out there that says the thing that I really hope is true, which is like, oh, and of course, the recipient said a minimum font size, you know, like whatever you have to say, address the we'll get to this later with some more stuff from the the knock knock duo.
John:
What do you call it?
John:
Video conversation thing.
John:
like if there's an obvious there should be an obvious question in most people's minds about the feature you're doing throw out a sentence or two to reassure us that the feature that you surely added to account for this is there because if you don't say it we're left to think that you haven't thought of it and even if that's not true it gives a bad impression and in this case i don't trust google to think these things because they very often do things that like you know the the company's persona is that of uh
John:
an individual that doesn't account for the variety of different kinds of people and lives that are out there and i know they're fighting very hard against that and i know it's kind of unfair but a lot of times i see google do things with obvious problems that i assume that they have accounted for then they release a product and i say oh they didn't account for that in fact it seems like they didn't even think of that and they'll fix it after the fact to their credit and it's not like they're trying to to do something wrong but sometimes they drop the ball so i'm saying google in your presentations for the foreseeable future
John:
When you show a feature that has obvious problems throughout two, Apple does this all the time.
John:
Show two or three words to say, oh, and of course, don't worry about this because we handled it an X, Y way, like in the obvious way.
John:
Because I don't think for me anyway, they get the past of making me think that they thought of that.
Casey:
I think that's understandable.
Casey:
We should also talk about the predictive replies or suggested replies with ding, machine learning, ding.
Casey:
That seems weird to me.
Casey:
And I have very conflicting thoughts about this, which is actually kind of a theme for most of what I thought of Google I.O.
Casey:
But it seemed odd to me to have suggested replies on a phone or a tablet where it's relatively easy to type.
Casey:
I don't really have a problem with it on the Apple Watch, partially because it's so terrible and partially because you can't exactly type on an Apple Watch.
Casey:
And we're going to get to that later as well, hopefully.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
On a device where there's some reasonable approximation of a keyboard, it just seems insensitive.
Casey:
Like one of the examples they used was like a picture of a kid.
Casey:
Oh, how cute was one of the replies?
Casey:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
That just seems insensitive or cold to me.
John:
so here here's an example a great follow-up from what i said here's an example where they did realize what the obvious objection to this feature would be and address it with a sentence or choose so the obvious objection from the demos is like i would never tap any of those circles because all of them sound like inane things like that that's not how i communicate right just like you were saying it's like really oh how cute am i going to send that like
John:
Or it's going to look like a form letter or it's going to look like I can reply, you know, similar complaints about the inbox software that they have for auto replying to emails and stuff like that.
John:
That's the obvious objection to any sort of, hey, we'll figure out what you're going to reply and give it to you in a box.
John:
Right.
John:
And they addressed it immediately with a single sentence, which may or may or may not actually address the issue in the product.
John:
But they're saying, oh, and don't worry, we will learn from what you actually reply and suggest things that are essentially things that you have said before that are otherwise in your voice.
John:
Now, will they be successful at that?
John:
Will they just literally have replies I've had before and it'll sound dumb and none of the boxes will look right?
John:
But at least they understand that they can't suggest replies without taking how you actually communicate as an input.
John:
And so they said, no, that's exactly what we're doing.
John:
Now, again.
John:
they can do a bad job of it and it'll still be a stupid feature that that people will want to turn off but if they do a good job of it it's like yes that's exactly what i want i want you to watch how i type to people and preferably how i communicate with different people how do i reply to my mom versus my wife versus my friend you know what i mean that's machine learning and again they keep leaning on that hopefully that's what they're aiming for they're not saying oh we're just going to give you a bunch of can replies like the apple watch does or probabilistically try to make a reply that would make some sense you know
John:
Apple Watch is not learning how I reply.
John:
It has no way to learn from how I reply.
John:
Apple doesn't have that information or whatever, but Google at least says this is what we're trying to do, and I really hope they do because that's the dream, right?
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
They also have plenty of third-party integrations in LO, and
Casey:
I initially was really keen on this.
Casey:
So I forget the exact example they used, but say you're talking with your wife about where you want to go to dinner.
Casey:
And, you know, so I'm talking to Aaron about it and she says, oh, would you like pizza?
Casey:
And I say, yes, I'd love some CCs.
Casey:
Then it will try to figure out some sort of contextually relevant information, like if it's something nicer than CCs.
Casey:
Oh, can I get your reservation or perhaps here's directions there, etc.
Casey:
?
Casey:
And on the at first I thought, oh, wow, that's super convenient, really useful.
Casey:
But then I thought about it and I thought, I don't know if I'd really want that in an iMessage conversation, which obviously is approximately the equivalent with Aaron.
Casey:
Like that just seems weird to me.
Casey:
And I can't I haven't put my finger on which one I think more.
John:
Well, it's great that they kept leaning on this.
John:
And I think it is a great feature is that you don't have to leave the app.
John:
This frustrates me when I'm on my phone communicating with somebody that I have to like, wait, let me go Google that or, you know, wait, let me go to this other app to do the thing.
John:
Having everything in line.
John:
One aspect of it is like, do I want the other person to see sort of the research I'm doing here?
John:
Do I want to share these things?
John:
that's questionable debatable although if you're trying to decide in restaurants maybe they do want to see them so you don't have to describe the restaurants or type them all in um so i can see the deciding what to share versus what's your own but the big advantage that app that google was selling and that i think is a real advantage is you don't have to switch to 15 different apps you can get it all done here mostly because sort of the power of google is showing through inside this chat application uh we will do all the searching and the pulling of the search results in smart ways and even the ordering and the making the reservation and
John:
And, again, it falls back on, like, that's a silly scenario unless everything in your life is integrated with Google and all the things you care about have third-party integration.
John:
But, hey, at least they have third-party integrations.
John:
And if third parties really care about this, they can integrate it.
John:
And if a restaurant really cares and wants to sell to tech nerds in the San Francisco area, they can integrate with it.
John:
It doesn't help most of the rest of the country whose favorite restaurants are not integrated in this way, but at least maybe you can get directions to them, assuming that Google has accurate information for where they are.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this one is a little bit fantasy, but Google is doing all the right things.
John:
And I think making people not leave the app is actually the right thing.
John:
It's just difficult to draw that line of how much crap do I need the other person to see versus how much stuff do I need to see to make a decision.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
They also allow you to play what they call the emoji game in line.
Casey:
So if you get bored talking to your spouse, you can play the guess the movie title by emojis game, which strikes me as the what do they call it?
Casey:
Digital touch features on the Apple Watch.
John:
uh but but it's not though because this was just their sort of like hello world example program the idea is that again third parties can make actual fun games with this api this is more like see it's like it's like making an uh you know an echo server for demonstrating your like simple you know server side concurrency framework right it just echoes back whatever you put in it's not a real thing it's an api and they fully expect people to make
John:
real fun games out of this and you know integrations with third-party products games that lead you to third-party products like there are many opportunities for both advertising and commerce uh integrated into this and so i i think i think showing that and by the way on stage essentially saying shall we play a game to your computer is not a good it's not a good look so maybe stay away from that um but
John:
The big thing I think they weren't selling is that we didn't just make a chat app that has some features in this version of Android.
John:
This is now another platform for you to target all your stuff at.
John:
You people out there who have products and applications and services can integrate with this and be integrated with it in a way that people can buy your stuff and find their way to your thing and play your game that advertises your thing or whatever.
John:
That's the feature.
John:
The actual emoji game.
John:
I don't think that was, I mean, it was probably clear to developers, but if a regular person saw that, they'd be like, oh, I'm not interested in emoji games.
John:
Ignore the emoji game.
John:
That is just a proof of concept, hello world type thing.
John:
Other integrations is what you're looking for here.
Casey:
Well, fair enough.
Casey:
Then they made mention during the LO conversation and a couple other times about security, which I really, really liked that Google and Apple seemed to be quietly colluding in the good way.
Casey:
to try to make their platforms more secure.
Casey:
But that being said, I wasn't entirely clear on what the security situation is in Ello.
Casey:
It seems that there's kind of two modes.
Casey:
There's the general normal use mode, which is encrypted-ish, I guess.
Casey:
It's encrypted enough to
Casey:
to prevent snooping by anyone but Google because they need to have their equivalent of Slack bot in there in order to offer all these suggestions.
Casey:
And then there's an incognito mode, which is just like Chrome in your messaging app, which is apparently encrypted E to E or end to end.
Casey:
That just, I like it overall, but that just seems weird to me to have to think about whether or not you want this to be end-to-end encrypted.
John:
Yeah, and I wasn't clear, too.
John:
I watched most of this presentation, but I didn't get a chance to rewatch this segment.
John:
In incognito mode, it doesn't hide you as the sender, right?
John:
The other person still knows it's you talking, right?
John:
You just initiated a new end-to-end encrypted session.
Casey:
I think that's correct.
John:
yeah all right so anyway um yeah it's it's i think you you got exactly right it it's a difference between can could google encrypt this if they wanted to uh in theory or can nobody do it and as has been discussed at length with iMessage even though iMessage is end-to-end encrypted as well because apple has control over the key servers still technically if apple wanted to be nefarious they could you know uh
John:
decrypt your conversations uh as they happen they don't do that and they don't plan to do that and they and they say they'll fight the government's attempt to make them do that but there's so many other ways to get your information like the i the unencrypted iCloud backups of your conversations and yeah it's much more complicated than simply putting e2e up on a screen and making people feel safe especially with with the government climate the way it is um but yeah the reason google i think doesn't didn't have iMessage style encryption from the beginning is because
John:
google wants to be able to see everything that you type and it wants to have a participant in the conversation who's in on it even if you didn't end-to-end encryption one of your authenticated end-to-end recipients would be uh something on a google server somewhere like i don't think they're anonymizing when they go back like apple is when they go back to the siri stuff because they kind of have to know things about you and know who you are to do smart server-side things because i don't think all this is happening on the phone right there is a server-side component so it's the
John:
tension we've always talked about is like that apple is trying to be good about privacy and like i don't even want to know your stuff but if you want personalized service from uh you know an intelligent agent with machine learning intelligent agent has to know how who you are i mean i want it to know who i am but now all of a sudden this intelligent agent is privy to my conversations and it's not a person uh and it's essentially owned and controlled by google
John:
So end-to-end encrypting it with the agent is not really helping things if you're worried about the government forcing Google to give it records.
John:
Anyway, I think in this day and age, if there's something you don't want the government to see, don't send it through Google.com.
John:
or any other service probably even apple i mean apple is probably your best bet but in general you'd have to take encryption into your own hands if you actually want which is fairly easy to do like you know the math exists it's out there you can get encryption software and use it yourself and communicate with somebody in a way that the government can't subpoena anybody to get but again you'll probably just screw it up and they'll be able to social engineer something out of you anyway
John:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about Duo and Knock Knock.
Casey:
So Duo is FaceTime, but not.
Casey:
There's more to it than that.
Casey:
And then what is Knock Knock?
Casey:
That's the intro mode in Duo.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, that...
John:
This is another one of the demos where they didn't say the obvious thing.
John:
It's like, oh, and when someone's calling you, look, I can see my daughter.
John:
And, you know, it's like your phone is ringing, essentially.
John:
It's like the FaceTime ring, right?
John:
And rather than just seeing the name of the caller and maybe like a little picture of them from your contacts or whatever, like, you know, your daughter is calling and you see your daughter's name and a still picture of your daughter.
John:
What you instead see is video from the caller side before you've decided whether you're going to pick up or not.
John:
right how can you do that demo on stage and not immediately say but don't worry this only happens for known contacts that are in your address book that you communicate with surely that is the case but you have to say that you have to actually say the words it takes two seconds to say the words otherwise the entire audience is going oh my god naked people are going to be calling me constantly and i'm going to instantly see their video because i can't stop them it's like like do they not have women at the company like that's what
John:
it's just the women would say i do not want to see a million guys junk as they randomly dial me and i have no choice and i see video of it immediately like and again i don't think that's going to happen because surely this only works for like your favorites or your known contacts like that's got to be a feature but you have to say it on stage because otherwise i think google seriously i don't know that really bothered me that that went unmentioned i feel like even apple would say and don't worry this only works for your contacts
John:
see how easy that is google i mean and again surely that's the case i think there have to be engineers inside google you know who understand the privacy implications of unsolicited video from strangers appearing on your phone screen but they didn't say it in the presentation or if they did and i missed it and i'm sorry no i don't think they did boy boy yeah as someone put in the chat room junk time instead of facetime
Casey:
So the thing that bothered me about the knock knock, to be honest, I didn't think about that, but you're absolutely right.
Casey:
But the thing that bothered me about knock knock was they started from a good place, which was video call phone calls in general, but particularly video calls are extreme are an extreme interruption.
Casey:
And you have to really dedicate your entire attention to a video call.
Casey:
And sometimes it is not a convenient time for that.
Casey:
But then again, on the other side of the coin, what if Aaron is calling me to say, oh, my God, Declan just took his first steps or something like that?
Casey:
So what Knock Knock does is it lets you see what this person is calling about.
Casey:
So I can see Aaron and Declan and I can see her freaking out.
Casey:
And in their little demo reel video, they showed a guy who was holding up two ticket stubs like he had gotten tickets to a concert or something like that.
Casey:
And then they showed another person who hold it up their left hand to show, I think it was their engagement ring.
Casey:
And so the problem I had with this, and maybe I'm just being a jerk about it, but it was like you have to earn your right for them to pick up your phone call.
Casey:
Like you have to earn it, man.
Casey:
You can't just call and be smiling.
Casey:
You got to perform.
Casey:
You got to put on a show or I'm not picking up the damn phone.
John:
Or they're not going to pick up.
John:
I don't think it's a real problem.
John:
Because, again, it's only going to be your actual people you know doing this.
John:
Right?
John:
Who's video calling you anyway?
John:
No one is cold video calling you.
John:
Or, in any case, you wouldn't pick up.
John:
It's going to be people you know.
John:
And the only time they would video call you instead of regular call you is if they have something to show off or they're an adorable child.
John:
Right?
John:
Why else are they going to... No one's going to video call you just to essentially have a phone conversation.
John:
Because who wants people looking at them?
John:
Unless they have something to show or they're in an impressive place.
John:
So...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I guess it just depends on who you talk to, but I don't feel like anybody who I would ever video call would deny my call because I was not sufficiently exciting in the video.
Casey:
Well, the other thing is any FaceTime conversation I've ever had has almost always been preceded by an iMessage conversation saying, hey, I'd like to FaceTime you.
Casey:
Are you cool?
Casey:
To your point, John, it's almost never me cold calling or somebody cold calling me with no previous warning.
Casey:
But is that perhaps because there is no knock-knock-like feature for me to kind of screen that call?
Casey:
Maybe?
Casey:
Maybe.
John:
I do get those, by the way.
John:
I do get a surprising number of not phone calls, but FaceTime calls randomly on my phone.
John:
And of course, my Mac is integrated with my phone.
John:
I don't answer any of them.
John:
From strangers?
John:
No, it's like unknown.
John:
Yes.
John:
Oh, that's weird.
John:
Just unknown caller on one number.
John:
And not a phone call and not a FaceTime audio call, an actual FaceTime video call.
John:
I don't know if there's like war dialers out there just trying every single number.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I've never answered one of them, so I have no idea what's going on, but it's annoying that it makes the FaceTime like bloopity bloop sound.
Yeah.
Marco:
I have a few relatives who basically treat FaceTime like phone calls, and so they will just call me on FaceTime unannounced.
John:
That's their call.
John:
My parents will do that.
Marco:
I think that's fine.
Marco:
But I've never wished for this feature.
Marco:
I mean, I'm sure it's fine.
Marco:
It's certainly going to be odd at first before anybody's used to it, because that's not how things have gone so far with these kind of video calling things.
Marco:
So there's kind of an expectation that you are not being broadcast before the person picks up.
Marco:
So I think you're going to see a lot of people picking their nose and adjusting their hair and stuff like that.
Marco:
Just like embarrassing prep before they think they're being watched.
John:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is something that people will have to get used to, but I think they will get used to it.
John:
Hopefully, it's an optional feature.
John:
Again, something they didn't mention, like, is this optional?
John:
It should be for only known contacts, and for known contacts, it should be an option, because maybe you don't want that to be the case of exactly the way you said it.
John:
You're just more used to, like, until they pick up, I'm not on camera.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
A couple of the quick notes about this.
Casey:
It apparently does really, really well with graceful degradation as the connection gets crappier and then whatever the opposite of that is as things get better.
Casey:
And the thing that I'm most excited about about this is that it's multi-platform.
Casey:
And I believe at one point or another, they had said that Ello and presumably Duo operates where your phone number is kind of your user ID, if you will.
Casey:
And something that I've struggled with is Erin's side of the family, with the exception of Erin, is exclusively Android.
Casey:
And there have been several times where we'd like to have a video chat with her mom, which her mom only lives about 20 minutes away.
Casey:
But maybe Declan is doing something funny or maybe...
Casey:
I don't know, we want to show her something in the house.
Casey:
We'd like to do video chat.
Casey:
And we don't feel like we have a mechanism to do that.
Casey:
Now, yes, I know that Skype exists.
Casey:
Yes, I know that Hangouts exist.
Casey:
Yes, I know that there are many other video chat apps that exist.
Casey:
But
Casey:
There's nothing that I personally have used that is as easy as FaceTime.
Casey:
And I hope that this Duo thing will be as easy as FaceTime.
Casey:
And so we'll be able to install this on our iPhones and my in-laws will be able to install it on their Android phones.
Casey:
And we'll be able to do these very quick, very simple video chats on a whim, which would be really, really awesome.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to that hopefully working.
Marco:
Or you can just wait for FaceTime to become an open standard because they're going to the standards bodies today with that.
Marco:
It's just a matter of time now.
John:
Yeah, this is another thing that's Google's strength.
John:
My experience with Google Hangouts, for example, is it is the first and best sort of multiple people on a video stream thing that I've ever used.
John:
And is the quality great?
John:
No, but they...
John:
like like really good video games and good ios applications and so many good things they they understand that the most important thing like they understand the hierarchy of uh of needs in a video call uh number one audio if you have to drop the video to maintain the audio do it because nothing is more annoying than not being able to hear people
John:
And then number two, responsiveness of video rather than quality.
John:
If you have to drop the quality to an obscene level just to keep track of someone waving their hand, then do it.
John:
Responsiveness and understanding the audio is the most important thing.
John:
And my frustration with FaceTime is often that the audio will start cutting out and it makes it impossible to even communicate about the bad video.
John:
And the video...
John:
We'll have higher overall quality when it's working, but when my parents' terrible internet connection starts dropping things out and it becomes like a slideshow, I wish it would just degrade to a much uglier algorithm.
John:
And FaceTime will do this.
John:
FaceTime will turn off the video entirely to go to the audio, but in practice, it does not do that soon enough.
John:
It very often struggles with stuttering audio, and I wish I could just...
John:
Like, just, you know, drop this entirely.
John:
Very often, FaceTime calls have been derailed by saying, just call on the phone because we know the phone will work and I'll be able to hear your words.
John:
So, again, I haven't, you know, the only thing I've used video from Google is, you know, YouTube, which, of course, is only Google by acquisition, and Google Hangouts.
John:
And I've always been impressed by...
John:
The performance under pretty dire conditions of so many people across the country doing one big giant multi-video conference call thing.
John:
So if this Duo thing works, and because it's cross-platform, it may end up being an easier...
John:
We'll see if it ends up being like my go to like I'll probably still do FaceTime with my parents because that's just what they're used to.
John:
But if it's but if FaceTime is messing up, I will have this app installed and I'll make sure they have it installed, too.
John:
And I'll say switch to this app and we'll just do a B testing.
John:
Oh, FaceTime is dying because of your weird internet weather over there.
John:
try this other app that I showed you.
John:
And hopefully it will be simple enough that they can figure it out and it will be connected up in a way.
John:
But I'm optimistic about this as being a decent product.
John:
And like Marco was ridiculing Apple for the open standard, Apple could have done this, but hasn't.
John:
Has FaceTime gotten appreciably better since it was rolled out?
John:
I'm sure it has.
John:
I'm sure it's gotten more reliable and the algorithms have gotten better and the quality is probably better at the top end than Google's thing is going to be.
John:
But that doesn't matter when I can only hear every fifth word that my parents are saying.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also FaceTime notably does not support more than two people on a call yet.
Marco:
And I hope we get that at some point because like, you know, iChat had that before FaceTime was a thing like we had that 10 years ago.
Marco:
So I know it's more challenging on mobile on cell connections and everything.
Marco:
It's not an easy problem by any means, but I do hope we get there.
Casey:
But is Duo, I mean, Duo itself implies two.
Casey:
I don't think that Duo is going to be more than one person, is it?
Casey:
Or more than two people, I should say.
Marco:
I mean, nobody actually has more than one other person they know with an Android phone, right?
John:
what are you talking about they're more than 50 percent of the market um the other thing is uh supposedly e to e encrypted always enterprise to enterprise yeah that one is e to e encrypted always uh well they didn't say always they just said end to end encryption they didn't give a qualification so i'm sure it just means always mostly because at this point i wouldn't say this is going to be true forever but at this point there is no google bot equivalent that needs to see every frame of your video do something intelligent but
John:
If there was sufficient bandwidth, both in terms of CPU and, you know, and data throughput, I'm sure, like, under unlimited conditions in a local environment, Google would love to have an intelligent agent watching every frame of your video and doing intelligent things based on it.
John:
Because, you know, again, it's still image recognition.
John:
You can do that on video.
John:
And then video recognition, where you're actually not just looking at individual frames, but the actual video, and having something realize...
John:
where you are what you're talking about being able to do hand gestures seeing your facial expressions uh then google you know would need to see your video and on the local device maybe maybe it could still be end-to-end encryption but again there's probably there's almost certainly a server component to this and so i don't know how long end-to-end encryption end-to-end encryption on on uh do only lasts until google realizes uh
John:
that they can do intelligent, helpful things by looking at your video.
John:
So that's probably still a ways off because of just bandwidth concerns and everything else, but I wouldn't expect it to be always.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, so updates to Android.
John:
Yeah, I was getting towards the end of this section.
John:
I had to skim some of this, but I tried to put some highlights in here.
John:
I'm sure there's things that I'm missing.
John:
uh vulcan vulcan was kind of depressing because i mean apple apple's been so far ahead with the graphics performance on their devices for so long especially compared to like the average of android versus just like the high-end android and then apple you know that opengl yes and then they did the metal thing which is a lower level thing and that was great and uh i'm sure it's good for ios game developers and everything but
John:
On the other side of the coin is the sort of open standard, OpenGL, Kronos group thing, which is Vulkan, which is based on Mantle from AMD and a bunch of other stuff, and it's very much like Metal, and all these ideas have been floating around the graphics community for a while.
John:
I don't like to see Apple as the
John:
It's kind of like the FaceTime situation.
John:
Oh, we've got our own thing.
John:
The only good thing about it is that Apple's own thing is actually pretty influential because Apple, a lot of games ship on Apple's platforms and they make a lot of money.
John:
So maybe they could quote unquote win just because most of the money in game development is happening on iOS.
John:
But I would really rather see Apple supporting the industry standards.
John:
Like, let's get everybody working together to make the low-level graphics API that everybody's going to use as opposed to Apple having its own.
John:
But Apple having its own is probably kind of a competitive advantage, and they are so big they can probably get away with it.
John:
But it just depresses me a little bit.
Casey:
fair enough uh let's see what else uh they did a lot with um just in time compilation which is kind of exciting and even just in time installation which is weird well yeah that the instant apps thing we thought a second but the just in time compilation is the flip side where i start to feel bad for google
John:
That they're still dealing with the JIT and they're like, oh, we'll profile the code and write the optimized version of it to Flash to make a faster launch each time.
John:
And I know they have pre-compiled apps too, but just that technical decision to go with initially a weird Java-ish language and just-in-time compilation and everything, they're still kind of paying the price of having to...
John:
Having to try to match Apple, which is shipping precompiled binaries, right?
John:
Precompiled, preoptimized binaries that are, you know, that are smaller, that they don't have to have the, you know, they're doing plain catch up here.
John:
And maybe long term, they're still doing the right thing.
John:
And maybe it's still an advantage.
John:
But in the current stage, there's lots of weird compromises that they're digging out from underneath.
John:
And so there's a whole section of the slides that are just things that Apple is just not concerned about because they don't have these problems because they don't have it yet.
John:
indeed uh they have multitasking yeah that that was like that was the part where it's like all right you did pretty much what apple did which is not that imaginative when apple did it it's not that imaginative when you did it which part did you think was novel i mean split screen and picture and picture is like literally like word for word uh the the uh you know ios ipad multitasking they did it on a phone which i think is something that apple didn't do like they wouldn't does apple doesn't even let you do split screen on the mini does they do they i don't know what the limits of that feature is
John:
anyway uh on the iphone no but they showed it on the phone basically top bottom split instead of from the side yeah well because you wouldn't want like two inch wide apps like side by side that would be awkward yeah well i don't know it depends on the app but uh yeah you can scroll the text sideways
John:
And they had the double tap to switch back really fast.
John:
Oh, here was the thing that killed me in this presentation.
John:
I kind of understand why they did it.
John:
So they showed their app switcher, which looks like all app switches look like these days, a bunch of little cards that look like WebOS from many years ago, showing all your applications.
John:
And they said, by popular demand, they added a clear all button.
John:
And that is essentially recognizing the fact that lots of people, either based on superstition or bad reasoning related to the iOS multitasker, or on the Android side, probably both of those as well, but also on both sides, based on just the idea that some people want to clean up messes and that having a bunch of quote-unquote open applications is visual clutter, right?
Yeah.
John:
And they just want to clear it out.
John:
So the newer version of Android does two things.
John:
One, they limit it to only 7, so they go off the end.
John:
They just don't show them, which is kind of nice for reducing clutter, but I hope that's adjustable somewhere.
John:
It probably is, because what if you want to see more than 7?
John:
And the second thing is the clear all button.
John:
It's like, sometimes I just want to clean everything up.
John:
I mean, I don't think I've mentioned this before.
John:
I've seen my son do it.
John:
I saw him using his iPhone, and he goes into the app switcher and flicks all the applications up.
John:
I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John:
It's like, where did you learn this?
John:
Who's teaching?
John:
like it's just they pick it up on the streets they pick it up like force quitting application so i had to explain to him you know the whole we don't talk about that much on the show but the angle that i gave to him i didn't want to explain to him about multitasking suspended processes and everything i said look
John:
When you do that, it's going to actually exit the program.
John:
I don't know if I said force quit or whatever, which means the next time you launch it, which will probably be two and a half minutes from now, it has to launch from a completely fresh state, whereas before it was just suspended in memory, ready to go the next time you used it.
John:
So you think you're quote unquote saving battery, which is the excuse he gave me, but you're probably not because launching from a fresh state takes more energy than unsuspending the application.
John:
So just don't worry about and don't leave them.
John:
But the other angle is, and which you have no argument is like, I just don't like seeing them there.
John:
Well, so Android users apparently have the exact same problem.
John:
So they gave him a big button that says clear all.
John:
What I hope the clear all button does is remove the graphics, but do nothing else.
John:
Yeah.
John:
leave them all suspended because that's what people want they just don't want to see the squares there that's what apple should do i mean they'd have to add a new feature for actual force quit but i wish flicking up the squares didn't do anything except for remove them from the multitasking switcher but everything else stayed the same they just stayed suspended and were managed in a normal way but
John:
boy this this ailment this is like the the zapping the pram of the mobile age or rebuilding the desktop i don't know how far back i can go and repairing permissions rebuilding desktops older like these voodoo solutions but this one i think there's a foundation that people just don't like to see the mess so android is giving them a clear all button we need to have like a summit like a like a g8 summit for like uh people who make computer devices to talk about uh pathologies related to the multitasking switcher there are a lot of them
Marco:
yeah i mean and i mean the sad part with the apple one is like it would be nice if we didn't have to do that and if they remove the ability to do that so that people could stop doing the stupid thing but unfortunately it does occasionally solve problems yeah you do need a way to force quit things like you do badly behave you do need a way to do that so you have to you can't take that away and just say oh don't worry we'll manage it all for you but the obsessive need to do it uh
John:
every time like i've seen my son do i've watched him it just he just like it's just part of his routine it's like there's no point in that you know and especially because you just convince yourself that if i don't do this something bad will happen like oh i just wish i just wish that it just it just removed the graphics because i think i think that's like 90 of it people just don't want to see the squares they don't want to see the little rectangles they want they want to feel like everything is a clean slate so fine get rid of the rectangles right
John:
But then, you know, when the Facebook app starts going crazy, you do need some way to actually kill it.
John:
Or sometimes when applications get all screwed up, which happens as well, like perfectly well-behaved applications where there's a bug in them all of a sudden, and every time you bring them to the front, they're just not working.
John:
That happens, and you need a way to get rid of them, get rid of them.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's a difficult situation.
Marco:
All right, I got it.
Marco:
This is how Apple's going to solve all their problems.
Marco:
you get one free clear all a day and then if you want more more with an in-app purchase yeah you can you can buy one for a dollar each uh if you want more after that their growth issue with iphone revenue is solved yeah it's an it's what do you call it it's an energy-based mechanic where you exhaust your energy you have to do that purchase to get more oh
John:
clear all i i don't know i wasn't there in the crowd but i wonder if that was like a big applause feature because they did say by popular demand all right someone someone who works at google please tell me that doesn't actually do anything except remove the graphics so it'll make me so much happier all right um we should quickly talk about um instant apps
Marco:
This is a really big, hairy, technical mess that might end up being really good, has a lot of potential risks, has a lot of potential ramifications, good and bad.
Marco:
And we don't really know enough about it yet, I don't think, to really say whether this is going to work, what the risks totally are.
John:
You're worried about security risks?
John:
Is that what you're thinking of?
Casey:
Well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Let me kind of explain what's going on here.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Explain.
Casey:
Chief summarizer.
Casey:
Chief summarizer, summarizer, and chief.
Casey:
That makes it longer.
Casey:
You're doing it wrong.
Marco:
I'm doing a terrible job.
Marco:
I'm fired.
Casey:
So the idea with instant apps is you're in a situation where you really want to consume some content that is associated with an app.
Casey:
So they gave an example of wanting to watch a BuzzFeed video.
Casey:
They gave an example of walking up to an NFC-enabled parking meter.
Marco:
Right, because critically, you want to do something with an app that you don't have installed.
Casey:
Sorry, yes, yes.
Casey:
So you don't have this installed, and you walk up to this parking meter, and the parking meter has some NFC ID that some way, somehow, Google and Android know are associated with such and such app in the Play Store.
Casey:
So what Instant Apps will do is it will...
Casey:
behind the scenes, instantly download the subset of the app that you need to perform the particular function you're trying to do, be that watch the BuzzFeed video or pay for parking or what have you.
Casey:
And it will do that and load it instantly or thereabouts so it's available to you.
Casey:
So you walk up to the parking meter, you swipe your phone near it, the NFC thing kicks in.
Casey:
It will download the parking meter app.
Casey:
You can put money into it.
Casey:
You can use your Android Pay and walk away and everything's good.
Casey:
And you haven't downloaded the entire app.
Casey:
You've just downloaded the pieces, I'm assuming the intents in the Android system, that are required for the operations you're trying to perform.
Casey:
At first glance, it sounds kind of good because I don't like downloading apps just for single-use events like this.
Casey:
And actually, I have in the past downloaded a parking meter app in the D.C.
Casey:
area.
Casey:
specifically to park in DC.
Casey:
And then I've never used it since.
Casey:
And so in theory, this sounds kind of good, but what happens then when I walk away from the meter, I didn't pay close attention to what the brand of meter was or what app I just got quietly installed for me.
Casey:
And I need to add time.
Casey:
Like, what do I do then?
Casey:
Does it say, Oh, you've just installed the park minder app.
Casey:
Does it,
Casey:
allow you to download the park minder app from the play store because you've instant downloaded it recently like how does that all work i'm actually less concerned about android apps splitting themselves up into pieces because they tend to be from what i gather from our android developers a lot more modular but this whole like user interaction i think it leaves a lot of questions in my mind
John:
Well, I mean, like with the machine learning and the context thing, like they said, oh, and you can add more time later.
John:
I thought the same thing.
John:
Like, how do I know how to add time?
John:
But contextually, basic machine learning stuff that they've already got, it knows what you're talking about because you just did a parking meter thing.
John:
And so if you just yell into your phone or type into your Google Assistant app, add another minute to the meter,
John:
it should know what the heck you're talking about from context and i think it can already do that but i i think the idea is that from this is kind of like getting more into the open doc model from a phone user's perspective for certain classes of things and perhaps a very large class of things they don't care so much about your app your app is important to you as the app developer they just want to accomplish something in the world whether it's paying for a parking meter or buying a movie ticket or
John:
You know, making a reservation at a restaurant they're in front of.
John:
And they just want to accomplish that task.
John:
They don't want to find the app that they need to download.
John:
I found myself in that position where I want to do something.
John:
And I've heard that you can do something with a store that I know.
John:
I'm like, what is their app called?
John:
Or what was the name of that app that I heard?
John:
Or like...
John:
Just based on other contextual clues and having an open API to say from the user's perspective, their phone will just do this.
John:
Something their phone couldn't do before it suddenly can do and fairly quickly without them having to search the app store for an app and download it.
John:
I think that's a good user experience and something they could be shooting for.
John:
Many problems exist in it.
John:
Security is probably one of the big ones.
John:
But like you said, is this just spamming my phone with apps that are installed as I walk past parking meters?
John:
Or even if I initiate it, how do I keep track of all this crap that's getting installed?
John:
There's a potential downside.
John:
for this to be abused but on the other hand it is a very apple-like feature i mean apple is the company that dreamed up open doc of like i'm not so concerned with your application i'm concerned with my task and it's like computers of the future you're like how does that thing all of a sudden know how to work with this thing it's like magic where you're like oh i've never used this thing before in my life but it has android integration i don't have to do anything all of a sudden my phone can do this thing that it couldn't do before and i think that's awesome i'm not entirely sure google is the company to pull that off based on
John:
the amount of weird things that go on in the Android ecosystem.
John:
But I endorse the idea.
John:
Like Chromebooks, for example, and like the whole throw your computer in a lake, it doesn't matter because everything is in the cloud.
John:
I like the idea.
John:
I like it as a goal.
John:
I don't know how close we're going to get to it with this particular implementation, but we'll see.
Casey:
Anything else on Android N?
Casey:
They didn't actually announce a name.
Casey:
They're soliciting names.
Casey:
They made the joke about don't call it something mix something face.
Casey:
But anything else on Android N?
Marco:
I mean, I think it's going to be interesting to see how much of this stuff plays out and develops.
Marco:
None of us use Android really ever, so I think it's funny that we just spent two hours talking about this stuff.
Marco:
But hey, it's industry news.
Marco:
I think it's also interesting to see a lot of the commentary so far has been that this is a lot of underwhelming stuff.
Marco:
A lot of it is kind of just...
Marco:
matching Apple features or giving their response to Apple features.
Marco:
And that's just how the industry goes.
Marco:
There are some years where Apple borrows heavily from Google features, and there are some years where the reverse happens.
Marco:
And this is a very mature market of these advanced smartphone OSs where I don't think we can really expect...
Marco:
that are on a much bigger scale than this most years because we're to the point now where this stuff is mature and the low-hanging fruit has all been picked.
John:
Is that really what you think after seeing this impression?
John:
You're like, oh, low-hanging fruit, they're doing kind of similar things.
John:
We shouldn't expect big changes.
John:
That was not my impression I got of this at all.
Marco:
Well, I mean at the OS level.
Marco:
The stuff they're doing with data services and machine learning, ding, ding, ding, that is where the advancement is happening for Google now.
John:
but you don't think instant apps is like i mean implementation wise who knows and by the way this implementation will work all the way back to jellybean which was another kind of sad part of the presentation was like oh look how good we are about backup compatibility no it's because you can't move your install base to your most recent os but anyway um i think that is an admirable and interesting goal that no one else is even touching like that is where have you seen something like that before i think it's an awesome idea
John:
uh and there are the first big player to say it's a thing and you can try to do it and you know lots of caveats about it but that's you know open doc didn't work and maybe this won't work either but from a user's perspective i think it is significant i guess like and that's i would call that an os feature like that's that's you know what else is like launching and installing and launching and running apps that's that's significant
John:
i don't know it's potentially so problematic like from just like a security and technical perspective like not not to say it can't be done but just like it's going to be yeah it's going to be hard to do it well and correctly and safely and it depends on support it's like apple pay would be crap if i couldn't use it anywhere but you know and it's like the technology and the idea behind apple pay could be great but if i couldn't use it in any of the stores it would be a total failure so there is the the infrastructure part of
John:
which is weird because you're like, oh, Android's the majority.
John:
They should be great on the infrastructure, but like they're the majority, but they're not always where the money is.
John:
And that kind of tends to lead to what, you know, so this is, let's put it this way.
John:
Well, this is an idea that I think Apple should share.
John:
And I think my overwhelming impression of this entire presentation is so how incredibly far behind Apple is in so many of these areas and how I don't see any hope of them catching up.
John:
Like all the things that Google emphasize, all of their strengths,
John:
machine learning server side stuff all of that i just look at that and i feel like if it was at apple like we can't do that we're terrible at this stuff we're so far behind them i can't even see them in the distance anymore they're this tiny speck like they apple is just trying to take its basic services and make them reliable and have some sort of infrastructure for doing things that google was doing reliably like five years ago this all this stuff is not a glimmer in anyone's eye at apple they've got siri and haven't been able to advance it this thing is dancing over siri's grave like oh it just
John:
If you're an Apple fan, like this makes me think of the good old days when Apple and Google were working together on the iPhone, how awesome it would have been if they had like, you know, divided the labor and say, Apple, you make the hardware in the OS and we'll do the services and together we'll make the awesome platform of the future.
John:
That didn't happen, unfortunately.
John:
But now we have the situation where Google is just...
John:
so much better at so many things than apple and that it doesn't seem like apple's getting better not only get not getting better fast enough but some of them not getting better at all at and it's just it depresses me um i guess on the bright side as long as apple continues to make uh good quality hardware and a pretty good os that sells a lot of copies google will continue to be forced to make like its dual application for ios uh but the other features like instant apps uh we have to wait for apple to copy and all the machine learning stuff
John:
i don't have any real hope of apple ever copying if their past history is any judge so boy this i think this was it's not like a giant victory of google apple because again there's things that apple does better as well and each one is obviously going to emphasize the area where they're stronger but this i feel like google is accelerating away from apple not just barely staying ahead in the areas that it has always been ahead at
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's really astute.
Casey:
One other quick point I wanted to make, and then we should probably wrap, is they talked about Android Wear 2.
Casey:
A couple of quick thoughts about that.
Casey:
Number one, I understand why the watch I carry on my wrist today and every day is a rounded rack, but man, the circles look so much better.
Casey:
And number two, they had a couple of different means of input, including like a swipe keyboard, which strikes me as freaking terrible.
Casey:
But they also had handwriting where, as you write, it scrolls to the left automatically, which I think I'd seen on OneNote or something like that in years past.
Casey:
But it seemed like an incredibly clever way to handle text input on a watch.
Casey:
Because you can put about a character on the screen at a time.
Casey:
And if it's scrolling automatically under your finger, it looked at a glance like it worked really, really well.
Casey:
And I'm very curious to hear if that is implemented well.
Casey:
And if it is, then I want it on my watch.
Marco:
I still believe that anytime you're doing text input on a watch, you've lost.
Casey:
I agree, but in a pinch, it would be nice to not have to use Siri.
John:
You just use graffiti.
John:
Yeah, totally.
John:
Just draw the same letter over the same spot.
John:
You don't need it to scroll.
John:
Just keep drawing the same letter on the watch face.
John:
The Android Wear, what it has going for it is they're trying everything.
John:
That's true.
Marco:
Well, honestly, I mean, I'm not going to get too far into this now because we're out of time.
Marco:
But honestly, I think, you know, Casey, you mentioned like, man, round looks so good.
Marco:
Android Wear can do different shapes than Apple can because the design of the platform from the beginning was, in a very Android way, to have a scalable system that could apply to, you know, any large set of different device sizes and shapes and characteristics.
Marco:
That, I think, ultimately will prove to be the better way for wearables to be designed, for wearable platforms to be designed.
Marco:
I don't think the current Apple Watch model of, we're just going to make one type of watch in one shape with one configuration, basically.
Marco:
Yeah, they allow all the different bands, and there's two different sizes of the same shape, but it's basically one configuration of the watch.
Marco:
And I think ultimately the Android version of you can have all sorts of different sizes and shapes and different capabilities, I think that will ultimately prove correct for wearables.
Marco:
Where it didn't really necessarily prove correct for phones, because most people just want...
Marco:
a rectangle phone with decent high screen that has a whole bunch of you know hardware in it and stuff but i think watches and wearables it'll prove to go the opposite direction and i i wonder i'll be very curious to see if apple takes the watch in that kind of direction because honestly i don't think they are headed that direction and i that worries me but we will see all righty thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week ring automatic and pingdom and we will see you next week
John:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
John:
So somebody who shall remain nameless and who is too embarrassed to be named on this particular podcast tells me, tells us, or tells me specifically, that I am wrong about quitting at iOS.
John:
He says it's his only salvation.
Casey:
Salvation from what?
John:
From, I assume, his battery draining.
John:
He says, you want a video?
John:
It's completely replicable.
John:
And I thought I told him in the chat here is that I thought I covered all bases.
John:
Yes, sometimes it's a badly behaving app that you have to force quit.
John:
Sometimes an application is in a weird state that the only way you can get it to work again is force quitting it.
John:
And some applications, even when they're working perfectly, you need to force quit right when you're done with them if you don't want them sucking your battery down.
John:
True.
John:
All true.
John:
And yet, I still say, the reflexive habit of force quitting every single application every time you're done with it is crazy because you are draining your battery more because you're just relaunching them fresh the next time you use them, which is gonna be 30 seconds from now when you launch your Twitter app again.
John:
crazy what i'm against is the reflexive routine force quitting of everything and that is the habit i see not the selective based on past experience that i have to force quit this application or drains my battery no that's not how people act most people it's just like flick flick flick flick use flick use flick use flick they're double tapping that home button like crazy they cannot have a single they can only ever have one thing there when they're done with it they flick it so they can go back to springboard and see nothing it's you know it's
John:
And he's saying it's not about that, it's about apps that won't launch.
John:
Like I said, sometimes they get into a state where you bring them to the foreground and they do nothing.
John:
And you have to force quit them to be able to launch them again.
John:
I understand that.
John:
And yes, sometimes the OS gets so hosed that you've got to reboot.
John:
But none of this argues for you must reflexively force quit every single application on your phone every time you use it, which, again, is exactly what I see, and it's what I see my son doing, and trying to reason with him has not worked, and he still does it, and it's an embarrassment.
John:
Okay.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
No, I mean, like, any reason that, any, like, legitimate reason that you'd need to force quit all these apps all the time is probably either a bug or a shortcoming in the operating system.
Marco:
And so, like,
Marco:
Yeah, Apple should fix those.
Marco:
It is totally valid today to say, I need the ability to force quit apps because sometimes they don't launch right or whatever.
John:
You're always going to need the ability, but just for it to be a 100% blanket habit is not a good idea.
Marco:
The Apple Watch, this is not a good example in general of how to design a responsive and stable software platform, but the Apple Watch has a way to force quit apps without having an app switcher.
Marco:
uh most people don't know about it but you can do it it's you know basically you hit the sleep button and then you hit it again it's look it up but uh yeah it it has a way to do that so like it is possible to still have some kind of gesture involving the the sleep wake button and holding it down in a certain certain way to have a force quit uh method without having without putting it in the switcher and having that be the method but
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think the whole design of the multitasking switcher itself needs a lot of help in a lot of ways, not least of which is that conceptually everybody thinks all those apps are always running all the time and they need to clear them out.
Marco:
So that's one of the many problems with the current iOS app switcher that is ultimately a design problem, not a technical one.
John:
yeah and the technical problem is when when you know an app gets stuck in that state where you have to kill it because it won't launch again like it will launch and you can you know run it and use it but it's useless or like you'll tap the icon and nothing will happen yeah and then like or just memory gets filled or corrupted or there's an os bug that happens but none of that argues for it happens all the time first of all you've got a problem with your phone and it's
John:
It's obviously not a widespread problem because plenty of people use their phones.
John:
And I don't force quit anything ever, essentially, because I don't use the Facebook app.
John:
I don't use anything.
John:
And I use iOS devices for years, not force quitting everything.
John:
So it's obviously not an endemic bug that affects every single device.
John:
If it's happening to yours, who knows what's going on?
John:
Maybe you have a problem and don't accept it as the status quo.
John:
as things working correctly.
John:
And even when you do have a problem like that, I feel like you can target it by figuring out which applications are the problem, when do I need to do this?
John:
Because if you can't do that, if you just give up and say, I have to do this all the time, it's just the easiest system that works,
John:
Like, I feel like it's a total failure of the product.
John:
Like, it's not the user's fault at that point.
John:
It's just that the product has so frustrated the user that they can't, that this is their tool for dealing with it, which is blanket force quitting, and they will never move away from it because it's the only thing that's given them salvation on whatever weird thing is going on on their phone or the apps they use.
John:
uh and i feel like if apple saw you do that they would feel that they have failed you as a vendor of a product because they don't want you to use it that way and you shouldn't have to use it that way and if you feel like you do whether it's true or not whether you have to if you feel like you do that's a that's a breakdown there but anyway i i would say if you if you are listening to this and you respectfully force quit all your apps
John:
uh, consider trying to target your force quitting, trying to target it better.
John:
And maybe if there's an application, that's a particular problem, get it off your phone.
John:
I know you can't tell people to get rid of Facebook.
John:
It's like telling people, I don't know, like give up their first born, but, uh,
John:
If that's not an option for you and a Facebook book is a problematic one, just try reflexively force quitting Facebook.
John:
But don't say reflexively force quit your favorite Twitter app because it's probably fine.
John:
Or maybe your Twitter app is a problem.
John:
I don't know.
John:
All I'm telling you is that it's not normal.
John:
You shouldn't have to do this.
John:
And I know many people who spend years and years using iOS devices across multiple hardware models and multiple OS models with multiple apps.
John:
who don't even know how to force quit, and they're fine.
John:
So it is not like a fact of life on iOS, and people should not be doing it.
Casey:
Please.